Inauthentic culture and its philosophical critics

the long version

Despite the pervasive feeling that much of the culture of Western democracies has increasingly become inauthentic or phoney, contemporary cultural critics and observers have paid little attention to the traditional philosophical criticism of inauthentic culture that began with Socrates. Aristophanes, and Plato and was applied, reworked, and extended by such philosophical cultural critics as St Augustine, Erasmus, Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Thorstein Veblen. This new study in the philosophy of culture and the history of ideas illuminates the problem of inauthentic culture and draws on the insights of major figures from the Western intellectual tradition to show that our contemporary problem is actually an old and enduring one. Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics will be of great interest to all those concerned with philosophy, cultural theory, and the enduring problem of cultural decline.